GyanpediaNDLMHelping Women Go OnlineCitizen Media NetworkDigital Literacy, Safety & SecurityDistrict Public Library
An online content sharing platform produced by students and teachers of over 500 government schools spread across seven states of India
Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) in partnership with Media Lab Asia of the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, Government of India, launched Gyanpedia in 2007 as an online repository of digital content generated by teachers and students of rural schools from Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala.
The portal creates a comprehensive, multilingual and dynamic virtual platform, which enables content exchange for the learning community all over the country. It helps facilitate learning, sharing and, thereby, boost e-learning and e-education processes. The process largely contributes towards India emerging as a knowledge society and tries to preserve local knowledge.
Gyanpedia promotes:
- Computer-aided learning at the grassroots level
- Valuable thoughts, ideas and creativity of school children using ICT
- Facilitation of educational content, besides showcasing, sharing, exchange for wider benefit of education community
Gyanpedia is India’s first multilingual e-content sharing platform for learning communities, and is available in seven languages. It is equipped with all knowledge sharing services such as Blog, Wiki, photo gallery, forum and videos, among others.
So far, over 500 schools in seven states connected with Gyanpedia, thus reaching out to over 4,00,000 students
Website www.gyanpedia.in
Education & Empowerment
If Access & Infrastructure projects create the hardware, projects in the programmatic area of Education & Empowerment provide the support needed to end information poverty and, thereby, economic poverty. All projects in this particular programmatic area are aligned to the national and global mandate of creating a digitally literate and information-rich knowledge society.
Contact Details
The National Digital Literacy Mission (NDLM) is a major feather in DEF’s cap. Today the NDLM has been adopted by the Government of India as a full-fledged Central government scheme in mission mode to ensure that every single household in India has at least one digitally literate person. The mission was, however, originally pioneered and developed by DEF in partnership with Intel to complement the government’s objective to ensure digital connectivity to all Gram Panchayats through the National Optic Fibre Plan to be implemented by the Bharat Broadband Network Limited. The NDLM is also a perfect example of how DEF has always taken the initiative to adopt a multi-stakeholder approach to address the issue of digital inclusion.
Taking Digital Literacy to Each and Every Household since 2012
The Government of India first thought of making at least one person in every single household in India digitally literate as far back as 2010 and invited private sectors partners, NGOs and other public sector agencies to implement the scheme with a multi-stakeholder approach. Then BBNL was established in 2012 to implement the NOFN and provide the connectivity backbone. It was then that DEF came forward to actually work out the framework for the NDLM that has now been adopted by the Central government of Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi under the Digital India programme. DEF implemented the NDLM as a pilot project in three panchayats in three different states under its own Follow the Fibre (FtF) project to set up Digital Literacy Missions in the first three Gram Panchayats that got broadband connectivity from BBNL. DEF used the pilot project to showcase how making panchayats and the citizens under them digitally literate can change the scenario of governance, empowerment, social inclusion, educational approach and employment. Today, DEF’s pioneering work has paid off and the NDLM is now being implemented across the country in mission mode by Central and state governments.
Outcome
- To empower rural communities with capacity building & training programmes and make them digitally literate
- To facilitate deployment of rural citizen services through digital means
- To create a digital data house at every rural community level to make them economically viable
- To generate social, cultural and economic advantages for rural communities with two information and content gateway
Focus Area
Taking Digital Literacy to Each and Every Household
Impact
- Covered 3 panchayats
- Reached over 1700 households
- Made over 1700 digitally literate
- Trained 6 professional Master Trainers; 10 informal Trainers
- Received FLAME award for 100 percent literacy in 3 Panchayats
Website: National Digital Literacy Mission
Education & Empowerment
If Access & Infrastructure projects create the hardware, projects in the programmatic area of Education & Empowerment provide the support needed to end information poverty and, thereby, economic poverty. All projects in this particular programmatic area are aligned to the national and global mandate of creating a digitally literate and information-rich knowledge society.
Contact Details
An initiative to empower women from marginalised communities to become digitally literate and able to access the Internet; 150,000 done and counting.
This is a Google initiative that DEF is implementing since August, 2014 through its CIRCs. The programme seeks to empower women by helping them through a step by step guide on how to use the Internet. The programme teaches basic computer skills, Internet skills, Internet on mobile, chat and e-mail etc.
Objectives
Make internet simple for women and girls
Focus Area
Empowering women by making them digitally literate
Impact & Outcome
- So far over 100,000 women have been trained since August, 2014
- Women in rural and semi-urban areas are now capable of obtaining childcare tips, cooking tips and recipes, financial tips and household tips by using the Internet
Education & Empowerment
If Access & Infrastructure projects create the hardware, projects in the programmatic area of Education & Empowerment provide the support needed to end information poverty and, thereby, economic poverty. All projects in this particular programmatic area are aligned to the national and global mandate of creating a digitally literate and information-rich knowledge society.
Contact Details
Providing a platform for stories from rural India that largely go unnoticed
Citizen Media Network (CMN) is an alternative media initiative from Digital Empowerment Foundation. The portal is a one-stop destination for stories with developmental perspective from aggregated from development news websites across South Asia, but with focus on India, on a range of areas like governance, environment, women, health, children, livelihood, gender rights and education, among others.
CMN seeks to become an open platform, which serves as a forum that encourages citizens to dabble with new media tools and techniques to share experiences and voice concerns. The website allows its users the opportunity to connect and converse with a large audience.
The aim of the project or portal is to encourage conversations and empower healthy citizen journalism in the region. In future, we want to convert CMN into a platform where we get stories from the ground from our 150 centres present across 80 districts of 22 states in India, thereby building the largest network of freelance reporters in the country and bringing the never-in-mainstream-news to the mainstream through the digital platform.
In the past, DEF in collaboration with the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) has also offered a diploma course in Citizen Journalism.
Objectives of CMN include:
- Providing readers a platform for motivational and development stories from rural India
- Bringing marginalised and underreported stories to the mainstream
- Providing training through workshops for rural reporters to develop effective stories
- Providing rural reporters the right tools to publish digitally
Website: www.citizenmedianetwork.org/
Education & Empowerment
If Access & Infrastructure projects create the hardware, projects in the programmatic area of Education & Empowerment provide the support needed to end information poverty and, thereby, economic poverty. All projects in this particular programmatic area are aligned to the national and global mandate of creating a digitally literate and information-rich knowledge society.
Contact Details
Seeks to advocate digital security and privacy needs, and train people going online for the first time the basics of using security tools and tips for safe browsing
Despite having around 400 million Internet users in India, online safety has received limited direct attention in India. In most cases, the focus is on obscenity, whether online or elsewhere, with the emphasis on publication or distribution. Interestingly, most of the grassroots people, including youth and government officials, are not even aware about digital security and safety. Thus, there is need of not only to educate them about digital accessibility but also need to have them first hands-on experience of learning how to be safe when online and ensure digital security and privacy. The National Digital Literacy Movement (NDLM) is noble, but digital security and safety is a necessity today to complement the former and jointly contribute to development, growth with equity.
Digital Literacy, Safety and Security is an initiative of Digital Empowerment Foundation and Google. DEF has been working on empowering rural communities with information and access to information through ICT and digital tools in an effort to bring changes in their lives. In 2007, DEF launched its first Community Information Resource Centre (CIRC) in Rajasthan’s Baran district. Since then, CIRCs have grown from three to more than 150 CIRCs spread across 80 districts of India in and around 22 states, serving over a million people.
There are six straightforward linkages of CIRCs to local institutions. These are schools & teachers; microenterprises; grassroots NGOs; panchayat & block offices; sub-health centress; & aanganwadis; and last mile wireless broadband connectivity as infrastructure.
With Google Safety, Security and Digital Literacy, DEF institutionally targets the local institutions and stakeholders in two parts. The first group consists of educational institutions, youth, children, out of school, dropouts and young women. The second comprises government institutions, panchayat members, self-help group members, aanganwadis; block office functionaries, and other local organisational members.
The objectives of this programme include:
- Introduction and sensitisation towards Internet safety, security and literacy
- Advocating privacy needs of users and means to stay safe online
- Promoting digital literacy
- Empowering government functionaries and enhanced governance
So far, the impact and outcome of the project has been as follows:
- Awareness created at more than 500 locations
- Five training of trainers conducted in five cities across five states
- More than 1,250 people have been trained in digital literacy, safety and security
Education & Empowerment
If Access & Infrastructure projects create the hardware, projects in the programmatic area of Education & Empowerment provide the support needed to end information poverty and, thereby, economic poverty. All projects in this particular programmatic area are aligned to the national and global mandate of creating a digitally literate and information-rich knowledge society.
Contact Details
An initiative to use digital interventions to bring about integrated development and thereby reinvigorate India’s over 650 dying public libraries into vibrant public spaces for knowledge, information, learning and engagement.
IThe District Public Library Programme is a collaboration of DEF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (linked to Global Libraries initiative) to improve access to critical information and knowledge resources for the library community including the disadvantaged groups towards social and economic empowerment. The project facilitates and strengthens the capacities of the district public libraries as access and resource centres with the support of information communication technology tools to benefit library users and others with critical information resources, knowledge support and capacity building interventions.
Objectives
- To envision the role and the functioning of district public libraries in India to respond and meet the changing needs of communities.
- To identify and propose the most suitable and sustainable public library models for India.
- To recommend directions that would help to facilitate a more proactive public library system with global standards and parameters applicable to Indian conditions.
- To digitally enable district public libraries and offer necessary information, knowledge, and services to the citizens and other stakeholders.
- To facilitate training, skill development and capacity building of library personnel and knowledge managers.
- To increase library traffic and help in sustainability of the library through networks of support and strong partnerships.
- To impart ICT skills and services training to local agencies viz. NGOs, SHGs, schools and MSMEs.
Focus Area Strengthening the capacities of the district public libraries as access, information and resource centres.
Impact & Outcome
In a time frame of 2 years the programme has:
- 2000 citizen users provided with access and service resources
- Digitised 3 public libraries in 2 states of India.
- Trained 200 citizen users in ICT management for contributing to library management.
- Provided career guidance and coaching to 500 youth
Website www.iplc.in/
Education & Empowerment
If Access & Infrastructure projects create the hardware, projects in the programmatic area of Education & Empowerment provide the support needed to end information poverty and, thereby, economic poverty. All projects in this particular programmatic area are aligned to the national and global mandate of creating a digitally literate and information-rich knowledge society.